Posts Tagged ‘equal pay’

Six years ago in January, President Obama signed his first piece of legislation — the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act – to extend the time period in which an employee could file a claim for pay discrimination. The Act overruled the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber, which Ledbetter said allowed her employer to pay her unfairly “long enough to make it legal.”

At the time of its passage, President Obama said that the passage of the Act would “send a clear message that making our economy work means making sure it works for everyone.”

Sadly, in the six years since the passage of the Act, the gender pay gap has – at best – barely budged. Indeed, by some estimates, the wage gap has actually widened in the last few years.

If the new Congress is truly committed to the goal of pay equity, concrete steps must be taken. First, Congress should pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which will strengthen the Equal Pay Act and help secure equal pay for equal work. Second, Congress must act to increase the minimum wage, as women make up two-thirds of the country’s minimum wage earners. Third, Congress should enact a universal, government-paid preschool program, as 10% of the wage gap is attributable to time that women spend outside of the workforce.

While the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was a step in the right direction, Congress still has a lot of work to do to close the persisting wage gap. Let’s hope by the Seventh Anniversary of the Act, we are closer to pay equity and an economy that truly works for everyone.

This article originally appeared on celavoice.org on January 29, 2015. Reprinted with Permission.

About the Author: Sharon Vinick is the Managing Partner of Levy Vinick Burrell Hyam LLP, the largest women-owned law firm in the state that specializes in representing plaintiffs in employment cases. In more than two decades of representing employees, Sharon has enjoyed great success, securing numerous six and seven figure settlements and judgments for her clients. Sharon has been named by Northern California Super Lawyers for the past five years. Sharon is a graduate of Harvard Law School and UC Berkeley. In addition to being a talented attorney, Sharon is an darn good cook.

On Monday, Oregon lawmakers considered a pair of bills that could significantly reduce the gap in average earnings between working men and women, which currently means the state’s women make 80 percent of what men do.

House Bill 2006 would make it unlawful for employers to pay workers of different genders who do equivalent work differently. House Bill 2007 would make it illegal to punish workers who ask about or discuss their pay with each other.

The first bill’s language is subtle, but it could have important consequences for women in the state. As written, equivalent jobs wouldn’t rely on having the exact same role at the exact same company. Rather, equivalent jobs would be those that are the same when the required skills, training, education, effort, responsibility, and working conditions are the same. For example, women who coach girls’ teams couldn’t be paid less than men who coach boys just because boys’ teams bring in more money. Employers could still have differing pay grades based on merit, seniority, training, and education differences among workers.

Rather than pay equality as we imagine it now, where only men and women with the same job titles should be paid the same, such an approach, often called comparable worth or pay equity, would seek to equalize pay for people doing different but similar work. This focus addresses the part of the gender wage gap caused by the fact that women choose or are limited to lower-paid work. Low-skilled fields that are 25 percent or less female pay nearly $150 more a week than those dominated by women. At the higher end of the skillset, male-dominated jobs pay nearly $500 more a week than those crowded with women.

Such an approach used to be widespread: As of 1989, 20 states had made comparable worth adjustments within their own workforces, spending more than $527 million between 1983 and 1992 to adjust 335,000 lower-paid women’s pay. This eliminated 20 percent of the gender wage gap, and in five states — Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, Michigan, and Connecticut — it was reduced by 25 to 33 percent. And a research paper found that the reductions in the wage gap were due to the programs, not other factors.

But they have since mostly faded away. One state, Minnesota, still has a robust program that requires all cities, counties, school districts, and other government entities to assess and adjust the pay scales between men and women every three years. Gaps crop up in the intervening time — last year, just 64 percent of the entities had equitable pay when the compliance process began — but they get addressed in the end. Yet it still focuses on the public sector; a push to move it into the state’s private sector by requiring companies that contract with it to analyze pay equity didn’t get approval last year.

Oregon’s second bill, HB2007, could also have a big impact on the state’s gender wage gap. Currently, about half of all workers across the country say that they are prohibited or discouraged from discussing their salaries. That makes it hard for anyone experiencing wage discrimination to find out what’s going on and correct it; Lilly Ledbetter, for whom the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was named, didn’t find out she was being unfairly paid less than her male coworkers for 19 years.

On the other hand, wherever there’s salary transparency there’s a smaller wage gap. It’s much smaller for the federal workforce, where few workers are prohibited from talking about pay and wage scales are usually public, and has shrunk significantly over the last decade. It’s also 40 percent smaller for unionized workers than for non-union ones and has been falling, and union representation often helps make wage scales transparent.

Little improvement on the gender wage gap has been made nationally. It steadily shrank between the 1960s and 1900s but progress has since slowed to a crawl, with basically none made over the last decade. A federal bill would similarly ban salary secrecy but has been repeatedly blocked by Republicans, while the pay equity, which is part of the Fair Pay Act, hasn’t been on the agenda in many years.

This article originally appeared in thinkprogress.org on February 10, 2015. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Bryce Covert is the Economic Policy Editor for ThinkProgress. She was previously editor of the Roosevelt Institute’s Next New Deal blog and a senior communications officer. She is also a contributor for The Nation and was previously a contributor for ForbesWoman. Her writing has appeared on The New York Times, The New York Daily News, The Nation, The Atlantic, The American Prospect, and others. She is also a board member of WAM!NYC, the New York Chapter of Women, Action & the Media

Republicans are mounting a counteroffensive against Equal Pay Day, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and indeed the very notion that equal pay is a serious issue. Since you can’t straight-up admit to opposing equal pay, the substance of the Republican counteroffensive is essentially this: We support equal pay. Just not any efforts to actually make it a reality.

It’s misleading, they say, to say that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes, because that’s not entirely a result of active discrimination. So let’s dismiss the social forces that lead to jobs dominated by women being paid less than jobs dominated by men, let’s dismiss the pressures that push women into lower-paying jobs or out of the workforce altogether, and then, just for good measure, let’s also wave away active, intentional discrimination. Because you can’t deal with that without government action or lawsuits against employers, and as Republicans, we’re definitely opposed to both of those things. So, oops, looks like there’s nothing we can do.

And talking about unequal pay is bad because, in the words of Sabrina Schaeffer of the Independent Women’s Forum, “Perpetuating the myth that women are a victim class harms women and makes them feel weak.” Heavens, no. Women are empowered by their lack of economic power, I suppose.

Republicans are also rolling out their more general answer on their problems attracting women voters, and of course, again, the answer is not to promote policies that help women. It’s to jump up and down pointing at the few women they have in office now. “See! Women! Now vote for us, ladies.” Never mind that of the 20 women in the Senate, just four are Republican (and while Democrats control the Senate, it’s not by a four to one margin, sadly). Never mind that of the 82women in the House, just 20 are Republicans—8.2 percent of their party’s House membership, compared to 29 percent of the Democratic Party’s House membership. (Which is to say, Democrats need to improve, but Republicans are downright pathetic.)

So, in keeping with their lack of interest in policy solutions for problems that women in particular face, Republicans are on the phone to Politico every other day announcing some new discussion of how they already represent women super well, thanks very much, and are now ready to make sure that women voters understand this. But, uh:

House Republican Conference Chairman Cathy McMorris Rodgers is the only GOP woman in leadership in either chamber. There are also fewer female Republican candidates running than in past election cycles.

But never mind all that! After all, they’re making a sincere effort to keep any of their male candidates and incumbents from talking publicly about legitimate rape this time around, so it’s all good, right? Right?

This article was originally printed on the Daily Kos on April 8, 2014. Reprinted with permission.

The latest numbers from Folio about who makes what in the world of magazine editing reaffirm what we already know: women make less money than men in comparable positions. Male editors-in-chief or editorial directors of magazines make $100,800 to women’s $85,100. For executive editors, men pull down $84,200 to women’s $65,700. And for senior editors, men make $63,600 to the $58,200 women take home in salary. What those numbers don’t tell us is how to start rectifying those pay gaps, which, as Folio editor Bill Mickey told The Atlantic Wire, start to seem inevitable: “We don’t have any further insight into that number, except that the gap has historically been about the same and I believe aligns with national trends across other industries.” We’ve collected data on gender and pay and gender and bylines for a long time. But if we want things to change, we need to start cross-referencing these numbers to see who’s doing worse, who’s doing better, and why.

Folio’s numbers, for example, break out pay not just by gender, but by whether the editors at business-to-business publications, consumer magazines, and trade publications, where they are geographically, by size of publication, and by years in the business. Looking at the numbers by gender alone are discouraging—they make it look like everyone is doing badly. But if we started cross-referencing those numbers, we might be able to see if some kinds of publications do better than others. Are women able to get a leg up in business-to-business magazines? Are the numbers skewed by bigger-than-normal pay gaps in New York, the center of the magazine industry? Are the numbers closer to parity in entry-level positions, indicating that time is doing the work to change a culture of pay inequality that magazines previously haven’t done?

These are the same kinds of questions that it would be useful to apply in film and television as well, where there is much less comprehensive salary data in any case. Knowing if women do better in dramas or comedies, in shows or films produced by different studios or airing on different networks or distributed by different companies would help us figure out who’s doing exceptionally poorly, and who’s made strides.

Until we figure out who’s doing better and who’s doing worse, we won’t be able to start asking questions about the specific cultures and practices that produce pay gaps and those that are proving successful at closing them. There are challenges, to that, of course, most significant that these surveys survive on some kind of anonymity. The organizations and individuals who are doing poorly would never want to be exposed as being so. And even organizations that do better may be hesitant to step forward to talk about their practices, for risk of exposing themselves to scrutiny for the work that still remains, and to questions from their own employees about whatever gaps persist. The fact that we lack information about salaries is intentional, and always to the benefit of companies that pay those salaries. Without accurate, cross-referenced data, it’s difficult for individuals to know if they’re being paid fairly and to negotiate if they’re not. And without those numbers, it’s impossible for us to identify industry-wide best practices, either. Numbers like these are an opening step in a road towards actual, useful transparency, rather than the end of it.

This blog originally appeared in Think Progress on September 27, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Alyssa Rosenberg is a culture reporter for ThinkProgress.org. She is a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com and The Loop 21. Alyssa grew up in Massachusetts and holds a B.A. in humanities from Yale University. Before joining ThinkProgress, she was editor of Washingtonian.com and a staff correspondent at Government Executive. Her work has appeared in Esquire.com, The Daily, The American Prospect, The New Republic, National Journal, and The Daily Beast.

For some high school graduates looking to get some more education and increase their income, or for people with college degrees looking to retrain into a new field, a certificate can be a good alternative to an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. But like just about everything else, certificates pay off less for women than for men:

Men who earn certificates earn 27 percent more than high school educated men. Women with a certificate, by comparison, only receive an average 16 percent increase in earnings over women with a high school diploma.

Some of that difference is because men are more likely to get certificates in higher-paying fields, such as construction, while women are more likely to get certificates in lower-paying fields, such as cosmetology. But that doesn’t explain the entire gap:

A male with a certificate in computer and information service can earn about $72,000 per year—more than 72 percent of his peers with an associate’s degree and more than 54 percent of male bachelor’s degree holders.

Notice we said “male.” Thanks to gender inequity, just as a man with a bachelor’s degree can out-earn a woman with a master’s degree, women don’t benefit from certificates as much as the guys do. A woman working in that same field only earns about $57,000.

That’s just one of the ways that the value of getting a certificate is variable: fewer than half of certificate-holders work in a field related to their training, and those working in other fields see just a 1 percent increase in median pay relative to high school graduates. But those who do work in the field they’ve trained in earn only slightly less than the median worker with an associate’s degree. Impact varies by race, as well, with Latinos getting the biggest earnings boost from a certificate over a high school diploma, while African Americans benefit the least from certificates. White certificate holders get much less of a boost than Latinos—but because white high school graduates earn more than Latinos, white certificate holders don’t need a big increase to keep out-earning Latinos.

The picture on certificates is mixed: Some certificates in some fields can mean real pay increases for some people. The picture on gender inequity remains clear: In any level of education, in just about any field, women are left behind.

This blog originally appeared in Daily Kos Labor on June 12, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson is labor editor at Daily Kos. She has a PhD in sociology from Princeton University and has taught at Dartmouth College. From 2008 to 2011, she was senior writer at Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO.

Last week, I talked with a cashier at a Ralph’s grocery store in Orange County, Calif. She told me she lives with and supports her 82-year-old mother and her disabled 56-year-old sister. She represents a growing group in the United States: a working woman who is head of household and also a family caregiver.

But with the rise of the low-wage retail giants like Wal-Mart, she is also part of a shrinking group: a union worker with rights on the job, health benefits, paid sick days, vacation and possibly a pension or retirement fund. And with a union contract, she won’t be arbitrarily paid less than a man doing the same job with the same seniority.

Wal-Mart = Unequal Pay

In June 2011, a sex-discrimination lawsuit brought by 1.5 million current and former female employees of Wal-Mart reached the Supreme Court, bringing national attention to the company’s policies of paying women less than men in every job category and promoting women less – often in spite of better job performance. The Court decided against allowing the women to pursue the lawsuit as a single class but Wal-Mart will likely have to face these claims individually for years.

Wal-Mart’s treatment of women workers is bad news for everyone fighting for equal pay. As the largest retailer in the United States and the world, Wal-Mart “leads the way” in setting standards and has the effect of depressing retail wages in every community where it opens shop. Right now, average pay for all Wal-Mart workers is $8.81 an hour and “full-time” is considered 34 hours a week. Imagine the woman I talked to at Ralph’s trying to support her family on that income in
California.

Equal Pay Day

Yesterday, we marked Equal Pay Day, which symbolizes how far into 2012 women must work to earn what men were paid in 2011. Women now earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn. We have not made a lot of progress since Equal Pay Day was first instituted back in 1996 when women earned 73.8 cents for every dollar men earned. I think the rise of companies like Wal-Mart and the demise of union jobs have a lot to do with our lack of progress in this area.

Let’s recommit to defeating Wal-Mart and what it stands for: low wages, bad working conditions, unequal treatment of women workers, union busting and a
business model that hurts the ability of working families to survive.

More and more families depend on a woman’s paycheck to put food on the table and a roof overhead. Two-thirds of women are either dual earners or the heads of households. Women are also carrying out the bulk of caregiving duties in families. We need decent wages and flexible workplaces with paid sick days and family leave. While Equal Pay Day is still fresh in our minds, let’s commit to getting involved in raising the standard of living for working women everywhere.

Let’s build the movement for workplaces that support caregivers. Let’s start with Wal-Mart.

The women who work in Idaho Gov. Butch Otter’s (R) cabinet make substantially less than their male colleagues, according to a McClatchy analysis of state salary data. Despite chairing the state Agriculture Department, for instance, Director Celia Gould makes less than male directors.

Gould has been with the administration since its first day in 2007 and oversees 259 employees; Commerce Director Jeffrey Sayer, by contrast, joined the administration in October and oversees 53. And yet, Sayer makes nearly $40,000 a year more than Gould, the highest-paid female employee. In fact, across Otter’s administration, the median wage for women is nearly $20,000 less than the median wage for men, McClatchy found:

She is the highest-paid of the women in Otter’s Cabinet but ranks just 16th among all top full-time officials. The median salary for 11 women in the Cabinet is $85,446; the median for the 33 men is $103,002.

“We really do have a glass ceiling in Idaho,” said Rep. Wendy Jaquet of Ketchum, the senior Democrat in the Legislature and a member of the budget committee.

While the pay gap between Otter’s male and female employees is substantial — the women make roughly 82 cents for every dollar earned by men — it isn’t as large as the overall pay gap between men and women in America. American women make about 77 percentof what men make, and the gap is even larger for minorities. In 2010, black women made 67.7 percent of all male earnings, while Latino women made just 58.7 percent. That wage gap costs women huge sums of money — a woman with a college degree, for instance, will earn $723,000 less over a 40-year career.

Despite legislative efforts, the gap isn’t closing. President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which made it easier for women to sue for pay discrimination, in 2009. Senate Republican, however, blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have updated the Equal Pay Act, closed many of its loopholes, and strengthened incentives to reduce pay discrimination, earlier this year.

This blog originally appeared in ThinkProgress on March 21, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Travis Waldron is a reporter/blogger for ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Travis grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and holds a BA in journalism and political science from the University of Kentucky. Before coming to ThinkProgress, he worked as a press aide at the Health Information Center and as a staffer on Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway’s 2010 Senate campaign. He also interned at National Journal’s Hotline and was a sports writer and political columnist at the Kentucky Kernel, the University of Kentucky’s daily student newspaper.

Parsing census data, Bass found that the six jobs with the largest gender gap in 2010 were insurance agents, managers, financial clerks, securities sales agents, personal financial advisers, other financial specialists — all in “the Wall Street-heavy financial sector”:

The financial sector pays women in the six major jobs with the biggest salary gap from 55 to 62 cents for every $1 made by men, according to the census. Female bank tellers, with a median salary of $23,695, came closest to narrowing the gap in the industry, pulling down 96 cents for every $1 earned.

One reason female professionals make less money in the financial sector is that they tend to wind up in lower-paying positions such as in public finance rather than on trading desks, said Louise Marie Roth, a University of Arizona sociologist and author of “Selling Women Short: Gender and Money on Wall Street.”

Women often simply don’t know how much they’re being underpaid because a large percentage of Wall Street salaries are based on bonuses that are kept secret, she said.

The gap is hardly confined to the financial sector — wide disparities exist in many other high-education sectors, such as among doctors and lawyers — but it’s notable that all six of the job categories with the highest discrepancy are in a single sector.

Bass notes that “women who want to earn more on Wall Street than their male colleagues have one reliable option. They can set up a shoe-shine,” where women make $1.02 for every dollar men make.

This blog originally appeared in ThinkProgress on March 19, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Alex Seitz-Wald is a reporter/blogger for ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Alex grew up in California and holds a B.A. in international relations from Brown University. Prior to joining ThinkProgress, Alex interned at the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS and at the National Journal’s Hotline, where he covered key senate and gubernatorial races. Alex also co-founded and edited the Olive & Arrow, a blog on foreign affairs for and by young progressives. At Brown, he contributed to several publications and served on student government.

It’s A First: Major League Baseball Player Takes Paternity Leave

National Public Radio recently announced that Texas Ranger’s pitcher Colby Lewis became the first major league baseball player to take paternity leave. The new MLB collective bargaining agreement allows players 24 – 72 hours off due to the birth of a child so Lewis took advantage of it. Shortly after the news, NBC Sports reported that another player, Washington National’s shortstop Ian Desmond, was also preparing to take leave to be at his wife’s side during the birth of their first child. It comes as no surprise that some folks aren’t happy about the new rule. For more, read here.

Before the amendments, many employees who were discriminated against were not protected because the courts narrowly construed “disability” and determined that they were not disabled. The change in the legislation, which is spelled out in the final regulations, makes it crystal clear that the term “disability” should be broadly construed to include coverage. As legal commentator noted:

The message from Congress and the EEOC for business couldn’t be any clearer. Stop focusing on whether someone is disabled and focus on the potential discrimination and reasonable accommodation.

The new regulations also list certain impairments which will almost always be considered a disability including deafness, blindness, autism, cancer, cerebral palsy, diabetes, epilepsy, and major depression. Employees with these disabilities were often excluded from coverage in cases interpreting the law before the ADA amendments. In other words, thousands of employees who had cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, etc. lost their discrimination cases because their employers argued, and the courts agreed, that they were not disabled under the ADA.

The bottom line is that thanks to the ADAA and the new regulations, ADA litigation will finally turn on whether the disabled employee was discriminated against – not whether he or she meets the definition of disabled under the Act. This is really good news and it’s about time. For more, read here.

Discrimination Lawsuit Raises Issue Of Who Is A Man

I ran across this very interesting story in the NY Times about a recently filed discrimination case and it’s worth talking about because it will make new law. The case is about El’Jai Devoureau, who was born a female, but identified himself as a man his whole life. In 2006, after he began taking male hormones and had a sex change operation, he adopted a new name, and received a new birth certificate from the State of Georgia which identifies him a male. His driver’s license and social security records also identify him as a male.

The legal problem for Devoureau came up when he began working part time as a urine monitor at Urban Treatment Associates in Camden. His job was to make sure that people recovering from addiction did not substitute someone else’s urine for their own during regular drug testing. On Devoureau’s second day, his boss confronted him stating that she had heard he was transgender. She asked if he had any surgeries. He refused to answer, stating that was private, and was fired.

Devoureau sued claiming discrimination. Michael D. Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund said it was the first employment case in the country to take on the question of a transgender person’s sex.

New Jersey is one of 12 states that ban discrimination based on transgender status. The federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would provide basic protections against workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity nationwide was reintroduced in Congress in April.

In its defense, Urban Treatment claims that the firing was legitimate since the sex of the employee in this particular position is a bona fide occupational qualification (“BFOQ”), an exception to employment discrimination laws which permits an employer to give preference to one group over another in narrow circumstances. (for more about the BFOQ exception, see here)

This groundbreaking case will certainly be an interesting one to follow.

Fair Pay Act And Paycheck Fairness Act Reintroduced On Equal Pay Day

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau in 2009 shows that women who worked full time earned, on average, only 77 cents for every dollar men earned. The figures are even worse for women of color. African American women only earned approximately 62 cents and Latinas only 53 cents for each dollar earned by a white male.

Accordingly, Senator Tom Harkin most appropriately chose April 12, 2011 — Equal Pay Day — to reintroduce the Fair Pay Act of 2011. Harkin has introduced this bill every congress since 1996. The bill would require employers to provide equal pay for jobs that are equivalent in skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions. It would also require companies to disclose their pay scales and rates for all job categories.

Under current law a women who believes she is the victim of pay discrimination must file a lawsuit and go through what is almost always a long drawn out legal discovery process to find out whether she makes less than the man working beside her.

Many will recall that it took Lilly Ledbetter nearly 20 years before she discovered she was being paid less than men doing the same job which prompted her to file a lawsuit. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against her in 2007 — because it held that the case was filed too late — Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which helps level the playing field for victims of wage discrimination. The bill was signed in 2009 by President Obama – but it didn’t go far enough.

Harkin was also an original co-sponsor of the Paycheck Fairness Act which passed the House during the 111th Congress but was filibustered in the Senate. The Paycheck Fairness Act would close loopholes in the enforcement of the current equal pay laws, prohibit retaliation against workers for sharing salary information with co-workers, and strengthen penalties against employers for violations of equal pay laws.

The Paycheck Fairness Act was reintroduced on Equal Pay Day by Senator Kristin Gillibrand and Senator Barbara Mikulski. For more about it, read here.

It’s both disheartening and disturbing that women still must fight this hard for laws intended to effectively prevent wage discrimination which remains rampant in the workplace today. For more, read here.

This blog originally appeared in Employee Rights Post on May 2, 2011. Reprinted with permission from the author.

About the Author: Ellen Simon is recognized as one of the leading employment and civil rights lawyers in the United States. She offers legal advice to individuals on employment rights, age/gender/race and disability discrimination, retaliation and sexual harassment. With a unique grasp of the issues, Ellen’s a sought-after legal analyst who discusses high-profile civil cases, employment discrimination and woman’s issues. Her blog, Employee Rights Post has dedicated readers who turn to Ellen for her advice and opinion. For more information go to www.ellensimon.net.

Yesterday, equal rights advocates marked Equal Pay Day to remind the nation that women are paid just 80 cents for every dollar men earn, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) introduced the Fair Pay Act of 2011 that would ensure that employers provide equal pay for jobs that are equivalent in skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions.

Harkin says that discrimination accounts for much of the pay gap and there are too many loopholes and barriers to effective enforcement of existing laws. “We need to strengthen penalties and give women the tools they need to confront discrimination.”

At the same time, we must recognize that the problem of unequal pay goes beyond insidious discrimination. As a nation, we unjustly devalue jobs traditionally performed by women, even when they require comparable skills to jobs traditionally performed by men.

Millions of jobs dominated by women such as social workers, teachers, child care workers and nurses are equivalent in skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions to similar jobs dominated by men says Harkin:

But the female-dominated jobs pay significantly less. This is inexplicable. Why is a housekeeper worth less than a janitor? Why is a parking meter reader worth less than an electrical meter reader? Why is a social worker worth less than a probation officer?

Women’s salaries are outpaced by men almost everywhere from the highest paying occupation to the lowest paying occupations. Everywhere from doctors and lawyers to cashiers and lesser positions, women earn less than their male counterparts.

The Fair Pay Act would also require employers to publicly disclose their job categories and their pay scales, without requiring specific information on individual workers. Under current law women who believe they are the victim of pay discrimination must file a lawsuit and endure a drawn-out legal discovery process to find out whether they make less than the man working beside them.

It took Lilly Ledbetter nearly 20 years before she discovered she was being paid less than men doing the same job and was able to file suit. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against her in 2007, Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that helps level the playing field for victims of wage discrimination that President Obama signed in 2009. Says Harkin:

On this Equal Pay Day, let us make sure that what happened to Lilly never happens again by recommitting to eliminate discrimination in the workplace and make equal pay for equal work a reality

About the Author: Mike Hall is a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. He came to the AFL- CIO in 1989 and has written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety. When his collar was still blue, he carried union cards from the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, American Flint Glass Workers and Teamsters for jobs in a chemical plant, a mining equipment manufacturing plant and a warehouse. He has also worked as roadie for a small-time country-rock band, sold his blood plasma and played an occasional game of poker to help pay the rent.

This blog originally appeared in AFL-CIO on April 12, 2011. Reprinted with Permission.